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Comment by LeifCarrotson | Hacker News Reader

Do you disagree?

I was educated at a public school, went to college on tuition funded by scholarships, where I learned things written in public libraries by people studying with public funds, now I commute physically on public roads and digital cables...

Anything I accomplish is tied up in our shared history. To say that the unique things I built are attributable to me and me alone is to ignore that someone else with the same knowledge and the same problems would likely come up with the same ingenious solutions.

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You can attribute your success to that, but that doesn't mean anyone gets ownership over a thing.

How much ownership though? 50%? 1%? 0.05%?

I don't want to nerd out on this too much and, like, come up with a Dungeons and Dragons rulebook-style answer to this problem, but we could do something like: if you make up to, like, $10,275, we could ask for 10% of that, and then if you make up to $41,775, we could ask for 12% of that extra money, and then up to, I don't know, $89,075, we could take ownership of maybe 22% of it, and if you're making a cool $170,050, 24%.

I know this seems a little fantastical and engineering-brain-y but it also means we don't have to spend much time thinking about how much of Obi-Wan Kenobi the state of Oklahoma owns; we can just settle the whole obligation back to society in dollars. I don't know, seems simple to me.

> I don't know, seems simple to me.

I think it’s already covered by a system called “taxation”, in which the government requires we pay for our income, the right to own the house we bought, the amount we made on retail sales, the right to live in our state, the right to live in our county, etc.

whoooooosh

Public school wasn't a choice.

Further not everyone learns so much from it. I learned to read before attending public school and was mostly meh at it. I learned math in spite of it (my math teachers would be schockedto learn I use it daily.)

That said the internet is where I learned most things and it exists thanks to the DOD and ISPs have a lot of subsidies to thank for their existence (at least the ones in the rural area I grew up in)

I agree it is tied up in our shared history. I hope you take that fact as reason enough to share your work in a reasonably accessible manner. But I cannot compel you to do so, at least not in most circumstances, exceptions being inevitable of course.

I agree with the essential point that no one exists in isolation, we all build on the work of others, but I don't see how your last sentence follows from the previous statements. We can all have the same background, but that doesn't make us all the same. There's strong evidence, for example, that genes play a large role in how we behave.

> There's strong evidence, for example, that genes play a large role in how we behave.

I’ve heard this said before. Can you link to some science about this please?

https://www.livescience.com/47288-twin-study-importance-of-g...

Ok. Genes play a large role in how we behave.

But we are reacting to society. Hence, clone versions of you living 100 years ago, in current times, and 100 years in the future are going to react differently because there are different inputs and different accepted outputs to their behavior. They all are going to have different assumptions about the world around them because they live in worlds with different sets of knowledge. Schooling would be different (I'm assuming things continue to improve/change over time in the future). Nutrition, healthcare, transportation, communication... all has changed so much.

And this is the same when comparing current times. Three clones of you might act similarly in some respects, but vastly different in others. We've studied this exact thing by studying identical twins, actually, and even growing up in the same country doesn't even out the differences.

At the end of the day, it does mean that even though genes might affect the way we act, the comment you are replying to is absolutely correct.

I don't understand your reply. I didn't say that people growing up in different times would act the same or that people with identical genes would act the same. I'm arguing that different people will act differently in the same circumstances. If you want to establish that OP is absolutely correct, you need to show that people with different inclinations and abilities act the same way as each other when in identical circumstances. This seems self-evidently incorrect to me. People have varying amounts and types of mental faculties and so make different choices, even when presented with the same situations.

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